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DIMA/PMA 2002 - Digital Photography's
all grown up and ready to take over the world.
Credit: By Ernest Lilley (originally published in Byte.com)
official website: PMA
Last year TechRevu editor went to the biggest photo technology show in the US to report on it for Byte.com. He'll be there for Byte.com next week, but you can look forward to coverage here in TechRevu as well. We thought you might like a look at last year so you can judge for yourself how far we've come. (This is the original version of the Byte.com article, © ernest lilley 2002)
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- Introduction
- Pro-Cameras
- Consumer Cameras
- Software: Adobe PhotoShop 7.0
- What's the world coming to? Kiosks.
- More Cool Stuff
- Foveon's
better idea -
Sensor Layer Cake - A Film Sized LCD
- Conclusion
- Glossary
Caption: Digital Photography isn't just catching on, it's catching on fire. Credit: Canon USA
DIMA/PMA is the Digital and Photographic Marketing Association trade show held every year in Orlando, Florida, winter vacation paradise for friends of Mickey Mouse, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld. The crowds that flock to DIMA/PMA aren't there for the local attractions though; they came to see what's happening in the photographic industry, specifically, what they are going to be selling in their stores this spring, and what they can look forward to for the holiday season later in the year. It's an annual pilgrimage for those of us who can't wait to find out what cool cameras and gadgets are in under development.
Camera, printer, and photographic materials manufacturers flock here too, and it's one of the more critical venues for product introduction around the world. Though the promoters had to work overtime to fill the entire Orange County Convention center, there wasn't much, unused floor space, and a post-apocalypse air of rebuilding prevaded rather than the nervous uncertainty I've seen so much of at shows over the past year.
Maybe it's because an economic recovery of sorts is hoped for in the second quarter of this year, but I think that there's been enough shakeout at this point, and enough time for planners to strategize, that those left standing have their sleeves rolled up and are ready to work. That and the explosive growth that this particular market segment still has too look forward too.
Nikon and Canon had the biggest SLR buzz at the show, each introducing a "less than $3000" SLR to round out their lines. Ironically, both cameras exceed their higher end brethren for resolution, a function of where you fall in the delivery cycle, though they lag in things like maximum ISO equivalence, shutter speed, durability of construction...all the things that used to separate pro cameras from those for advanced amateurs.
Caption: The Nikon D100, the camera we've been asking for..)
Nikon likes to call the D100 "the camera you asked for" and they've got a point. Though some of its specs are still being hammered out, like how many shots per second it will take, it has plenty of features that common folk with pro-dreams can't help but love. It has a 6.31 megapixel sensor, takes all the Nikon lenses, has a powerful built-in flash (guide number 51), takes AA Batteries in the optional handgrip, has a bright and easy to use through the lens display, and most (or least) of all it's not heavy, unlike the D1 series which I've carried around enough to know you don't want to carry them around. The weight savings comes from the extensive use of plastic rather than metals like magnesium, and the camera doesn't go "Thunk" when you press the shutter as a consequence...but you don't get a permanent groove worn into your shoulder either. They're hoping to ship it in late June.
Caption: Canon's nearly pro-contender, the 6.3 megapixel D60.)
Canon is positioning its new 6.3 megapixel D60, a twice the resolution version of the D30, its original entry into the digital SLR world, as a pro-sumer camera, though it seems comfortable with the realization that plenty of professionals will be using the it. The D60 will be especially handy in studio work where its differences from the recently introduced Canon 1D, like light sensitivity and frames per second, won't be an issue. The D60 feels great, and though it's purely subjective, it just seems crisper than the Nikon D100, a little more solid, a little more pro. Increasing the pixel count of the CMOS sensor made it necessary for Canon to lower the maximum ISO rating to 1000 from the D30's maximum 1600. On the other hand, they have added softwarethat reduces digital noise in exposures up to 30 seconds without requiring the photographer to put the camera into a special mode as some do. You can tell by the pop-up flash that this isn't supposed to be a serious Pro camera, but I'll be it sees plenty of action.
Caption: Leica joins the digital world with a "digital reportage camera.")
Leica's new 4 megapixel Digilux 1 may not be as big or expensive as other cameras, but I couldn't resist putting it in here. Leica is one of those companies that doesn't make cameras for anybody but itself, and the romance between photojournalists, serious photographers and this German glass grinder has been going on for generations, so when Leica makes a serious entry into the field, the world needs to take notice. This isn't news to Leica, as their press kit refers to it as the "digital reportage camera."
Built for Leica by Panasonic, the boxy Digilux 1 looks almost more like a prototype than a finished product, but that's got more to do with Leica's ideas about style than anything else. It's got a big 2.5" LCD viewfinder with it's own light hood, as compared to most camera's 1.8", a 3x Zeiss zoom lens with an equivalent 33-100 mm range, and packs in a respectable 4 frames per second. One neat feature is the available adapter for Leica's spotting scopes, turning the camera into the perfect tool for birdwatchers, astronomy buffs, and paparazzi. On the negative side, Leica chose Secure Digital for the memory card format and a maximum equivalent ISO of only 400.
Though Leica had previously put their name on a Fuji camera, this is really the first time they've involved themselves in a digital design. Let's hope it's the start of a great new line by this iconoclastic camera maker.
Last year, who made the best digital camera in each price range was a hot question, but this year, it's tres passé. Having looked at the output from camera after camera, image quality just isn't the determining factor anymore. If you're buying a brandname camera, you can count on the image quality. Everything else comes down to personal preference regarding features, and there are features galore to choose from. There are so many new models out in fact that I'm not even going to try to list them; instead here are three that each offer something unique.
Caption: 3/4" thin, the Dimage X proves the adage about good things and small packages.)
It's Tiny! I love little cameras with big ambitions, and that describes the Minolta Dimage X perfectly. This incredible little gadget packs a 3x optical zoom lens, 2.1 megapixel image, and the same image processing technology used in their top of the line Dimage 7 into a stainless steel and aluminum body approximately 3/4 of an inch thick and smaller than a 3.5" floppy disk!
I'll forgive them the SD card and lithium battery, as they needed them to achieve the form factor, but that's the only forgiveness the Dimage X needs, as it boasts an incredibly quick start up time of 1.8 seconds. You'd never guess that it's got a real zoom lens inside, but Minolta used a clever folded light path to do everything inside the case. The lens stays completely inside the case, it's got a perfectly good flash, and it does movies and audio annotation besides.
Caption: A shockproof and waterproof camera from the folks who brought you the G-Shock watch.)
It's Tough! Maybe you'd like something a little tougher to go with your active lifestyle...or even just because you occasionally drop things, like I do. Casio ha come out with the GV-10, a "water, dust, and shock resistant" camera that laughs at your "extreme" sports. It's got a soft rubber grip molded around "long strand fiberglass" and the internal circuitry is mounted on shock absorbing gel. What else did you expect from the folks who came up with the Casio G-Shock wristwatch? You can hook the GV-10 up to a Windows PC and use it as an internet cam for those video conferences from your Everest base camp, or use the auto mail attach feature to create email and size images to your specification to send back reports on your white water rafting trip down the Rio Grande. It's a 1.23 megapixel camera, but they have an algorithm to create 1600x1200 pixel images.
Caption: Nikon does the twist with its new COOLPIX2500.)
It's a Twister! Nikon introduced its newest little camera, the COOLPIX 2500, at the show alongside the semi-pro D100. You know, they really ought to bundle them as a set, because there are times when this little camera is just what you need. Following the camera as styling accessory concept the little 2.1 megapixel twist cam hangs from a lanyard and stows just about anywhere. Like the 900 series COOLPIX, its 3x zoom lens swivels down to use, but it's got a sturdy metal frame around it to protect the camera. It has 12 scene modes to make picture taking easier including "museum" (no flash) and "copy" (black and white). Like most cameras in this category, it's got plenty of email features for easy picture sharing.
Software Scene: Adobe PhotoShop 7.0 (top)
Like a blockbuster movie series, Photoshop's back with a new release. Adobe Photoshop 7.0. - This time it's practical. Unlike those long suffering catastrophes of cinema, Photoshop just keeps getting better and better.
You've got to like the Healing Brush, a new retouching tool that allows you to smooth out wrinkles and imperfections without losing the color, shadows and lighting of the underlying picture. There's more web functionality, including improved transparency tools for gifs and rollover tools that allow you to create interactive objects for web menus and buttons. In my opinion, the most overdue addition in version 7.0 is the new File Browser that lets you view and inspect files without opening them. Considering how powerful this program is, and how long it's been around, I've never been able to understand what took them so long to add simple thumbnail viewing.
There are a number of new commands for color correction, including Auto Color, which adjusts the color of the image without changing its lighting, and a new command to adjust color cast, which lets you set a white balance by selecting an area that should be gray in the picture and adjusting all the colors in the image automatically.
I don't use Photoshop for text much, but I'm not one to shun the addition of a spell checker if it keeps me out of trouble and I'm looking forward to trying out some of the new paint tools they've added. The demonstration of Photoshop's Pattern Maker, which generates backgrounds from sampled areas, was just plain cool. Adobe has added a lot to this release, and I've only scratched the surface. Although I don't upgrade just for the sake of it, I think the $149 upgrade price here will be money well spent.
Photoshop is designed to let other companies make "plug-ins" to take advantage of their expertise. While I was at the show I saw Applied Science Fiction's two latest plug-ins, Digital SHO and Digital ROC which take image editing tasks I frequently have to do from being a complex process to the straightforward application of their tools. Digital SHO takes shadows and highlights and optimizes them, useful because the limited range of light values digital cameras can see often results in either too bright highlights or too dark shadows. Digital ROC restores and optimizes color in faded images, which takes more than just "pumping up the volume," as faded images also tend to develop color casts.
Between them, Adobe and ASF have just made photo retouching a whole lot easier and faster.
What's the world coming to? Kiosks. (top)
Caption: Sony's Picture Station comes as either a standalone or countertop kiosk.)
Today's revolution in home printing has been likened to the darkroom craze of the seventies, when photographic enthusiasts turned their bathrooms into fume filled shrines and whiled away the hours under the baleful orange glow of safelights. And just like those days, it's still a lot easier to press the shutter than to get a good print to share. You may have a great photo-quality printer sitting by your computer, and you may have run off your share of stunning ink-jet prints...but more of the shots you've taken are probably languishing in your hard drive somewhere, and you may be getting tired of hearing friends and family (who did their part by standing still for their picture at a party) asking when you'll get around to putting them up on a website or actually printing them out. Both of which take time, or money, or both.
One word; "Kiosks."
Free standing or sitting on a counter, set up in a fast photo place, gift shop, theme park or in the middle of a supermarket, kiosks give are being set up to take our credit cards and give us back everything from instant pictures from digital cameras to ten minute film processing and prints, with a CD thrown in. The future of sharing prints isn't your desktop printer, it's going back to the fast photo places.
There's no shortage of kiosk products coming out: Kodak, Sony, Olympus and others; all ready to cash in on consumer's desires to take digital pictures but get back photographic prints. Two kiosks stood out above the others in terms of coolness and innovation; The Polaroid Opal™ and Applied Science Fiction's Digital PIC™ Dry Film Processing Personal Photo Lab. These two products are both exciting approaches to personal photo output...and completely different concepts
Caption: Polaroid's "Opal" kiosk shoots out 4x6" prints at an amazing one per second.
Polaroid may be in Chapter 11, but that doesn't mean it's closing its doors. Maybe it will wind up shedding a lot of fat and becoming a radical new innovator, and if products like the Opal are any indication, that maybe isn't so far fetched. The problem with photo kiosks as they currently exist, decided Polaroid, is that they try to give the customer a lot of stuff they don't really want, and they try to take up time the customer doesn't have.
What people want, they discovered, was 4x6" prints...and they want them in a hurry. Well, the Polaroid Opal™ doesn't mess around. All it does is high quality 4x6" glossy prints, and it shoots them out at the rate of one per second. Really. I think they missed a bet by not making them shoot up into the air.
Applied Science Fiction, who's been making great image enhancement software like the scratch removing Digital ICE™ that Nikon builds into its scanners, had a completely different idea. Not only does their kiosk take every format of digital media I could think of...it takes 35mm film too.
Caption: The coolest kiosk has to be Applied Science Fiction's. It does everything from develop film fast to print thumbnails on your CD.
Place your film canister into the slot on top of the panel, make your selections, slide your credit card through, and amazing things happen. First, the film drops into the machine, never to be seen again. Inside, the film is coated with "fairy dust" and the image is read by a scanner as it develops. They don't bother with fixers or washes or anything, they just scan the image and dump the film on a take-up reel to be thrown out later. Ten minutes later, a CD pops out with thumbnail images printed on its top and three different resolution copies of the pictures from your media burned in.
The whole thing comes out in a package with an index print on the outside, 4x6's on the inside, and the CD in its own sleeve. Oh, you can use the kiosk to scan already developed film or slides too...and you get those back.
The notion of having your film eaten by the processor seems terrifying at first, but when you think about all those negatives lying aound you've never taken in to have prints made from...it starts to seem more and more reasonable. Yes, I would rather have high resolution file than a negative, now that you mention it.
Leave it to a company named Applied Science Fiction to come up with a radical concept.
Caption: Kodak combines film and digital in the next generation Advantix.
Kodak makes WYSIWYG for film with the first bimodal camera. Although they won't bring it to the market until the first quarter of next year, Kodak's Advantix Film/Digital camera generated a lot of excitement over at the big yellow pavilion. When you take a picture with the camera, it shows you a digital interpretation of what your film saw on the rear LCD, so you can go back and take another if you don't like it. You can't preview the shot before you shoot, and if you're out of film, you can't take any more pictures, which makes you think they must be in the film business, but you can use it to upload VGA images to email.
Got Juice? The new gold standard for rechargeable AA batteries is 1800 mAh. Quest, which is distributed by Minolta in the US. It may be a coincidence, but Minolta makes more cameras that take AA than anyone else. Though designers may like custom designed batteries, most consumers and reviewers I know prefer AAs for the ability to change batteries. Complete with a quick charger the Quest 1800s should be available for about $40.
Got Storage? Both Sandisk and Lexar are upping the ante with 1 Gig Compact Flash cards. Lexar is certain theirs will be faster, and SanDisk is sure theirs will cost a lot less (around $800 versus over $1000), and by next year everyone will make them. But for now they're the microdrive alternative.
It's a hard disk with an LCD. Over at Nixvue Systems I ran across a product I've been waiting for to arrive, basically a hard disk in a pocket sized case with a small LCD display, a compact flash slot and its own OS. You can unload your shots to the Nixvue Vista, sort through thumbnails to see that they actually arrived, and zoom in on them to show your friends. You can also output to a TV, use the USB (1.1) to slave it over to a PC or Mac, and copy, delete, move, rotate, and show slide shows of your pictures. I think portable drives are going to be very popular, and I think these guys are going in the right direction. An MP3 adapter is coming for it, as well as Ethernet, firewire, and printer adapters for Epson and HP output.
EyeSee 360 Panoramic photography. Though IPIX pioneered the 360 degree panoramic digital shot, they're not the only way to do it. In fact, they may not be the best way according to the folks at EyeSee 360 and Kaidan Inc, developers of the 360 degree One VR. Designed to work with a Nikon 990 or 995, the reflective optical device provides 360 degrees of panorama with 100 degrees of vertical range, 50 above and 50 below the horizon. While using a 180 degree fish eye lens has the advantage of showing the area directly overhead, which shows up as a black blob on this product, that's usually just open sky or plain ceiling, and the additional vertical range this systems offers more than makes up for it.(www.eyesee360.com)
Not only were there a lot of cool products at the show, there was some pretty interesting technology there too.
Foveon's better idea: Sensor Layer Cake (top)
Caption: Foveon served up RGB layer cake at the launch reception for the X3 chip, naturally.
Different wavelengths of light travel get absorbed in silicon at different rates, with the longer wavelengths penetrating the deepest. Chip designer Foveon took advantage of this by making a three layer sensor, called the X3, that stacks three different photo detectors on top of each other so that every single pixel can record red, green, and blue. Conventional sensor chips use a mosaic of sensors with the red, green and blue laid out side by side to do the same thing, then try to make sense out of it in software. The new approach has advantages in resolution, simplification of image processing, reduction in color artifacts, and, because the new sensor is made from a CMOS provided by partner National Semiconductor, it's cheaper than the standard CCD chip. Another feature that the new chip provides is the ability to group pixels together to make larger virtual pixels with greater light gathering power, allowing cameras to switch between resolution and sensitivity prioritization. Foveon says that there are applications for the new sensors for the entire range of digital camera products, from inexpensive consumer cameras to pro-digitals and for video cameras as well.
Caption: photo credit: Foveon
The sample pictures they provide are stunning, but I don't remember seeing other sensors do quite as badly as they show. If they're not overstating their case, and they may well not be, it's an important step forward for digital photography.
How long do you have to wait to try the Foveon X3 out, and will you have to mortgage your house for it? Not long at all says lens and camera manufacturer Sigma. For around $2500 and before the end of the summer (prices and availability have not been released, but this is the ballpark I got from Sigma at the show) you can buy a Sigma SD9 Digital SLR with a 3.54 million pixel sensor. Since each pixel has three sensors in it, Foveon is claiming that we'll see unprecedented sharpness and image quality.
Because it's actually cheaper and easier to make smaller and more complicated chips than bigger ones with the same pixel density, all image sensors up to this point have been smaller than the pieces of film they replace. In an SLR using standard lenses, this means that not all the light focusing area of a lens is used, making lenses seem more telephoto on digital SLRs than their film counterparts. The Nikon D1x, for instance, gives you 1.5 times the magnification using the same lens as you would get using a Nikon 35 mm. This may see like a good thing, but actually, it makes a lot of kinds of photography very hard, and a whole new generation of 14mm wide angle lenses has popped up to compensate.
Contax, working with Philips, went out and solved the problem the straightforward way, by coming up with a chip that exactly matches the size and proportion of a piece of 35 mm film. It's 24x36 mm and has 6+ million pixels on it. If you want one, you've got to plunk down $7000 for a Contax N Digital, and that's before you buy any of the highly rated Zeiss lenses you'll need for it. It's an advance I didn't expect to see for a while yet, and one that probably has the leading professional manufacturers gnashing their teeth.
Though the photography industry felt the impact of the economy's downturn like everyone else, the rapid growth of digital imaging puts them it in an enviable position for resumed growth. Prices will continue to come down as technology and volume improve, and everybody will wind up a winner.
This year's DIMA/PMA in Orlando wasn't as hype ridden as other years, but it was full of energy, great products and determination. Now that the technology of picture taking has reached the point of diminishing returns, companies are turning to the output side to continue the industries growth.
Just as the "paperless office" spawned a printing boom, digital photography and home printing is poised to spawn a new photo finishing boom through kiosk, minilab, and web-order printing, especially for small (4x6") and large (over 17") prints.
Digital cameras and printers are on the verge of becoming commodity products, just as computers have, and the fierce completion that this means will benefit both the consumer and producer as they drive prices down and volume up.
There are still plenty of breakthroughs to be made and surprises in store, but the bottom line is that the digital revolution is over, and everyone won.
-- Ernest Lilley (elilley@mindspring.com)
CCD - Charge Coupled Devices are the most popular digital camera sensors.
CMOS Sensor - Not only do CMOS chips store data, it turns out that they are light sensitive too. While CMOS sensor chips are the exception rather than the rule, they are less expensive to manufacture than CCDs and Canon in particular has had excellent results from them in their middle upper end Digital cameras.
ISO equivalence - ISO is the standard for film speed, and though digital cameras don't have film, they need something for consumers to relate to. 100 is pretty slow, 400 was as considered fast before digital, but now speeds like 800, 1600, and even 3200 are showing up on higher end cameras. Like fast film, though, the cost is in image quality, and those higher speeds get pretty noisy.
SLR - Single Lens Reflex - The SLR camera design lets you look through the lens itself to see what the film will "see." It's been the standard of professional photographers for half a century but digital SLRs have only appeared on the scene in the last few years.
